Lake Huron, USA - Jeff Schaeffer

My name is Jeff Schaffer, I am from Ann Arbour Michigan. My waterbody is Lake Huron.

There are quite a few places on Lake Huron that are interesting but there’s this one place that I love. It’s a place where there’s a large shallow bay, that is filled with boulders. During the spring you can wade out into that bay with a fly rod and you will catch smallmouth bass of a trophy size, and you can catch and release fish all day. You might only catch about 25 because they're so big it takes a long time to land a release the fish.

A few years ago I was talking about with a friend of mine who is a tackle representative and he works for a lot of fly fishing companies that make rods and reels and I convinced him to come with me. He’s fished all over the world and we waded out into the bay. I had to convince him to come up there because he didn’t believe me. We came to some rocks in the water and I said, “Flip your streamer out there, only about 40 feet, get it as close to the rocks as you can."

Sure enough a large bass shot out and inhaled the streamer and he landed it and he released it. He said, “That was really cool!” And I said, “Cast back there again.” And so he put his streamer into the rock five times and he caught five fish. He turned to me and he said, “This is the most fantastic fishing experience of my life and I’m so glad that I came here, with you. The last ten minutes have made this trip, they’ve made it worth coming and I turned to him and I said, “Well you’ve seen nothing yet because this isn’t really where we go and fish!” The rest of the day was even better.

To have a place like that, that is so wild and unspoiled, where you can simply drive up to it and park your car and said in a fly rod, is just fantastic.

Every person that I take to this place to fish, pretty much says the same thing. I fish with people that have fished all over the world and they say, “When I think about my fishing past or I think about my fishing experience for some reason Lake Huron comes to the top and the place just haunts me.” And they say that independently, that’s one of the reasons I love Lake Huron, I think it’s the coolest lake and that’s my story.